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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: December 18th, 2023

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  • I was a volunteer admin on the site ~15 years ago. I think I still have privileges there, but haven’t been actively editing or adminning recently due to a long series of policy changes that removed almost all of the site’s appeal to users such as myself. The site split from ehow due to a founders’ dispute over the value of crowdsourcing and wiki-spirited openness. Now that wikihow is doing everything that Jack Herrick hated about ehow, I think it’s time to call his experiment a failure.

    Most of the content is now being created by staff writers, often for advertising sponsors. Often not even a how-to topic. Many of these articles are fully protected. It’s very much the sort of crap I used to delete, when I was deleting crap for them. Most non-staff articles are hidden and unsearchable.

    There is no quality control. Staff have openly embraced SEO and clickbait engagement metrics, at the expense of factual accuracy. This has resulted in the mass emigration of editors like me who used to provide fact-checking services. The “expert review” is a joke. It’s only there because Google thinks it makes the site credible. Google is wrong and are defrauding their searchers too.

    There is no editing community anymore. Some children like the gamification aspects and use user spaces as a social media and chat site. It’s not well-suited for that purpose, but they’re children and don’t know any better. I think one editor from my era is still active. I don’t know why he’s still there.

    They’re arguably violating the copyright of their editors by hiding the history tabs and denying CC-BY attribution. They did CYA by only using the CC licensing for external reuse, while granting wikihow broad rights to use submitted content commercially and without attribution. This policy was not as well advertised as the Creative Commons part, and no doubt some of the content creators from my era either didn’t notice, or expected wikihow to not abuse it. Hiding this also adversely affects readers’ ability to access an article’s reliability by checking for better versions and impedes the transition from reader to editor.






  • I’d require something after algebra 2, but not necessarily calculus. Calc 1 should be an option, just not the only one. Other options could include Stats / Data Analysis, or a Discrete math with CS algorithmic applications.

    When I include statistics here, I don’t mean the more common (and IMO useless) pre-calculus stats class where you get to calculate the standard deviation of 5 numbers and draw box plots. I’d rather a class inspired by How to Lie with Statistics. Techniques for collecting biased data, or selectively interpreting good data to reach a pre-determined conclusion. Immediate career implications for prospective journalists, politicians, marketers, etc. and also societally useful in a Defense Against the Dark Arts sort of way.










  • The day I learned this was the last day I made fun of poor people doing various stereotypical things that are considered “bad financial habits” in middle class upbringings. For example, buying lottery tickets with your welfare money is NOT evidence of poor people being bad at math. It’s a rational financial decision in their existing regulatory environment. A lottery winner can fly right over the welfare cliff, while the people saving up for a car repair get punished and pulled back into poverty. Maybe they’ll enjoy a few years of luxury until they squander it all because they never learned that staying off the dole requires different strategies than getting off the dole.